Pioneers and Soldiers Memorial Cemetery, Minneapolis

It began as Minneapolis (or Layman’s) Cemetery, a privately owned burial ground, in 1858. By 1919 it was full, with more than 27,000 bodies, and was closed by the City of Minneapolis. Only a handful of burials have taken place there since. It is the oldest cemetery in Minneapolis.

Farmers Martin and Elizabeth Layman came to Minneapolis in 1853. Like many early Minnesotans, they were born in New York and made their way west in stages—in their case, by way of Peoria County, Illinois. They bought land at what later became the corner of Cedar Avenue and Lake Street in South Minneapolis. The Laymans seem to have gotten into the cemetery business by happenstance when, soon after they arrived, a Baptist pastor asked to bury his infant son, Carlton Cressey (or Cressy), on their land.

They opened Minneapolis Cemetery in 1858 and expanded it to ten acres in 1860. The Laymans, their farm, and the cemetery prospered, and the family built a stately house across from the cemetery gates on Cedar Street. Often known as Layman’s Cemetery, it grew to twenty-seven acres and eventually held around 27,000 remains.

Both Laymans died in 1886, and their house burned down soon after that. The burials continued, but maintenance declined. By 1919, the cemetery had reached capacity; that year, the city closed it to new burials. Over the next several years, some 7,000 remains were dug up and taken elsewhere. In 1928, the City of Minneapolis took over ownership and changed the name to The Minneapolis Pioneers and Soldiers Memorial Cemetery. After multiple petitions, new burials were allowed on existing family plots on a case-by-case basis.

The “Pioneers” part of the name is more apt than “Soldiers.” There are only about 190 identified veterans in the cemetery: one from World War I, two from the War of 1812, twenty-one from the Spanish-American War, the rest from the Civil War. About twenty-five are clustered in a small military plot, the rest scattered. Civil War veteran Oscar Vaughn (16th United States Colored Infantry) is one of many, perhaps hundreds, of African Americans buried at Pioneers and Soldiers.

Almost all the cemetery’s remains belong to early residents of Minneapolis (some would call them pioneers), many of them immigrants of humble means. Some headstones are carved in Swedish and German. No one famous is buried there, and a striking feature of the cemetery is the absence of large monuments; only a relative handful stand as high as five feet. Many headstones are tilted, missing, or broken, and some have been crudely patched together.

The headstones of old cemeteries often hint at sad stories—epidemics, industrial accidents, child mortality. Such stories are hard to find at Pioneers and Soldiers because so few markers can be read; most are marble, effaced long ago by time and the elements.

Fortunately, in 2003 Susan Weir published a history of the cemetery, in Hennepin History magazine, based in part on its paper records. She uncovered many touching stories: August Smith and Ole Shay, workers killed in the Washburn A Mill explosion of 1878; Harry Hayward, hanged for the 1894 murder-for-hire of Kitty Ging; Anna Clark, a widowed mother of eight (and another eight dead in childhood) who took her own life on her husband’s grave in1909; twenty-five infants from the Cody Hospital, a so-called “baby farm,” who died there in 1908 and 1909.

Weir also compiled some compelling statistics. Over half of the graves belong to children under the age of ten. A majority of all the burials resulted from communicable diseases that rarely kill people in the 2000s. Some 800 died from accidents (more than a hundred in railroad accidents) or homicide, and another 150 by their own hands. The cemetery silently testifies: Life in Minneapolis was shorter, harder, and more uncertain a century and more ago.

The last known burial at Pioneers and Soldiers Cemetery took place in 1999. Though the cemetery is located in the middle of a busy, heavily trafficked neighborhood, the grounds are quiet. The low headstones, many unmarked graves, and tall trees give the place an open and park-like feel. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2002. The Friends of Minneapolis Pioneers and Soldiers Memorial Cemetery maintains a searchable online database of burials.